February 2021 Flash Lit 7 - Stuffed to the Gills

Humpty Dumpty was sitting with his legs crossed, like a Turk, on the top of a high wall—such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance—and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn’t take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure after all.  Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6

 

 

 

The taxidermied rat on top of the bookcase had perfectly beady little eyes.  Butterfly almost jumped out of her skin.  She managed to avoid flinging herself into the plenteous spiderwebs that decorated the doorway into the living room.  Ms. Journeyman, the lawyer, sneezed.

 

“Your uncle wasn’t that interested in housework toward the end,” she said.  “But, to be honest, he wasn’t that interested in it ever.”

 

Butterfly looked at the piles of boxes, the bales of papers, the books, the pillows, the cast-off garments, the overstuffed chairs, the rat, and wondered if she had made a terrible mistake in accepting Uncle Magnus’s legacy.  Her old apartment, poky as it was, had at least not been a major habitat for dust mites, spiders, and rodents.  “I didn’t know him,” she said.

 

“No,” Ms. Journeyman agreed.  “I think he was afraid to contact you before he died.”

 

Butterfly ran her hands through the mop of her graying hair.  She was not a tall woman, a little pudgy, often disheveled.  Intimidating was not the word that came to mind in connection with her.

 

“Magnus needed a private detective to find out that you existed.  He hadn’t spoken to your mother since 1965, so he didn’t know she married your father or that you were born or anything,” the lawyer continued.  “His relationship with his family was…”

 

“Nonexistent?” Butterfly suggested.

 

“Did you know your grandparents?” the lawyer asked, clearing a path through the hoardings to a worn table in the dining room piled with yet more boxes and books and papers.

 

“They died when I was small,” Butterfly answered.  “Grandpa had a heart attack and Grandma had cancer.  I remember Grandpa reading to me.  Grandma was terrifying—she lost so much weight toward the end that she looked like Cruella DeVil.”  Butterfly removed the empty plate and creased newspaper off of a chair and passed it to the lawyer.  “How did you know my uncle?”

 

“Oh, we met at protests.  Against the war, against nukes, for free speech, civil rights.  We boycotted grapes,” Ms. Journeyman straightened up in her chair.  “And then we got smart and decided that we should use the law against The Man.”

 

Butterfly noted the pride in the older woman’s brown eyes.

 

“Magnus was the only reason I made it through law school.  In those days, a black woman like me had to deal with a lot.  He used what would now be called his white privilege to advocate for me at every step,” she said.  “Of course, he was also sometimes kind of a jerk.  Not a flexible person, back then.”

 

“Family trait, I think,” Butterfly said, thinking of her mother and her stubborn silence even now about her brother.  “We’re stuffed with stubbornness.”